dukeofbookingham:accidental-wedgie:quiteliterallyhotsauce:This is slavery.All these for-profit dicke
dukeofbookingham:accidental-wedgie:quiteliterallyhotsauce:This is slavery.All these for-profit dickeads are doing is making life more miserable and volatile by alienating the prisoners from their families and making it more difficult to educate themselves.John Oliver managed an incredible segment on this back in august:It’s painfully clear all these people amount to for for-profit prisons can be summed up in a number prefaced with a dollar signI teach a writing workshop in prison, and you wouldn’t believe how restrictive the policies are about what books inmates can buy and how many they can keep in their cells. They’re often limited to what can be ordered from a prison catalog (which further benefits the for-profit prison industry) and the selection is laughably limited. Every time I go in I bring donations from my mother’s book club and the university where I teach and what’s piled up in my own house. Every holiday season I get wishlists from my class and find as much as I can for what I can afford, and I have had students cry when I put a book in their hands that would have cost them a week’s wages or more. This is not to tout my own philanthropy. This is to just to say: this shit matters. If you’re a bookish person looking for a way to give back, consider doing a book drive or just donating your old books to a nearby correctional facility. Make sure you check what the institution’s policies are–you want to make sure the stuff you’re donating is actually getting to the inmates, and there can be a lot of red tape–but trust me, this is a good thing to do. So many of the people I work with want so badly to better educate themselves and learn new skills so they have some chance of making a life once they get out, but the system makes it difficult to do that because it depends on their labor (and their recidivism). Moreover, they lead pretty tough lives. A little escapism goes a long way. So, once again, please donate books to prisons. It matters so much more than you think. -- source link